


Extinction

by iimpavid, It_MightBe_Love



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe, Winter Soldier (Comics)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Conditioning, Escape, F/M, Gen, Happy Ending, Human Experimentation, Hurt/Comfort, Hypnosis, Jewish Bucky Barnes, Jewish Character, Medical Inaccuracies, Psychology, Torture, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-13
Updated: 2018-06-13
Packaged: 2019-05-21 20:43:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,535
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14922506
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iimpavid/pseuds/iimpavid, https://archiveofourown.org/users/It_MightBe_Love/pseuds/It_MightBe_Love
Summary: “So we’re gonna treat each other like lab rats? You know what they do to lab rats when the experiment’s over, right? I read about it back in—” He casts around vaguely for the year and comes up blank; it’s been a long time since the mission that had him set up as a graduate student at Oxford. The memory is vague, something about radiation sickness— “Whatever. Anyway. They don’t let you take the rats home after they’ve been all fucked up no matter how cute or harmless they are.”(In which we remember that there was more than one Winter Soldier but the first was the best.)





	Extinction

**Author's Note:**

> Gnev (anger)  
> Starista (bayou)  
> Devyatnadsay (14)  
> Otets (father)  
> Nastoychivost (perseverance)  
> Devyat (9)  
> Toskuyushchiy (homesick)  
> Sliva (plum)  
> Odin (1)  
> Skvorets (starling)  
> *****
> 
> Warnings include: a single vague allusion to sexual assault at the beginning; somewhat-graphic depictions of violence and warfare

**1924: The White Queen**

She has no memory before the authority. None which she will share with them. She comes to them young. But she knows, in the deepest recesses of her ribcage and mind, that she will do good work.

She wants nothing more than to please them.

They give her a knife and put her in a room with others. It is only one knife, the others are not armed. She thinks they might be asleep. Or drugged. The speaker in the room says only one of them may come out of it, that that one will be rewarded.

She wants nothing more than to please them.

She does. 

 

_1930: Murmansk_

Under the training and the programming, she stays quiet, placid. Does as she is told quietly with eyes cast down. They are a shade of green they say is unnatural.

The first time a doctor tries to slide his fingers up into her body, she breaks his wrist and drives a scalpel so deeply into his temple, the blade juts free from the other side of his skull.

She doesn't forget the punishment for it, but neither do the doctors forget how relentlessly she had defended herself.

 

_1938: Stalingrad_

She brings a scientist to hysterical tears. They avoid her, when she is escorted through the halls. Soldiers and converts alike, armed to the teeth and nervous in a way the other Soldiers do not make them.

* * *

 

 

**1940: The Winter Soldier**

She is used as an example. Or she is to make an example of, those who would defy the Authority. The room is more amphitheater like one might have seen in early Victorian England. She does not know where she is, she suspects this is deliberate.

The Soldiers in the newly formed program are wild animals. They have no control. They mean for her to instruct them, so she does.

She is given no weapons, but there are furnishings in the room, and she is a weapon. These are the first words she has spoken in years: " _I am a weapon_."

Those who survive the theater are sent to other facilities for further training.

It takes six days before a doctor will come near enough to ensure she is healing properly, they have to rebreak and set her right arm. She makes no sound.

 

_1942: Austria_

The White Queen becomes Anya Miskevich, and she is paraded around on the arm of various officials. Her German is flawless, with a distinct rural mountain dialect that HYDRA could not have programmed into her, but then, the White Queen is documented as having an ear for language.

She spends time in the Third Reich. In his inner circle, smiling vapidly and repeating the same mantra as Hitler's followers. The Authority wishes only for her to observe.

In a bar filled with American soldiers she is meant to document, they tell her, the product of the Americans scientific efforts.

The man they call Captain America is broad-shouldered, blond. She is meant to get close to him, but it is not him who catches her eye.

The file she has on James Buchanan Barnes is spare. He was held beneath the authority for a short time and it is the blue of his eyes that draws her in. She breaks protocol, she smiles and feels it warm her.

"Hey, sugar, what's a beautiful girl like you doin' slummin' it around here."

Anya who is Nastoychivost, who is the White Queen, laughs. It catches funny in her throat, "It ain't slummin' if it has this sorta view."

He holds out a hand, "Sergeant Barnes, my friends call me Bucky."

"Lydia. This make us friends Sergeant Barnes?" She takes his hand and notes how very warm he feels.

"Well I guess that depends on your definition of “friends”."

She gets close to Captain America, close enough to know that his Commandos have no idea the true intentions of HYDRA. In the back of her mind, she thinks, _not yet_.

Sergeant Barnes is an attentive lover, and an exceptional kisser.

The following week Lydia the army nurse, dies. It's a pity, Nastoychivost has never had sex, and the four days she spent in his bed, anomalous as they were, were educational.

 

_1944: Siberia_

They call her Nastoychivost.

Perseverance.

She responds to it, but in private they still call her the White Queen.

They bring soldiers into the program. She knows she isn't their first, but she is their most successful. She kills with a finely honed grace. Moves silent as shadow. The raging creatures they lock into rooms with her, the ones who survive, are moved onto the next stages of their programs. There are not many survivors.

A drum resounds in her chest, that she must protect. What, she does not know. She does know that she does not forget anything.

*

“Dobroye utro, soldat.”

Reconditioning is essential and always done as soon as he comes out of stasis. Limp and too cold to shiver, the Winter Soldier is dragged to the chair with its electrodes and bite guard and given once again the ability to see the world in absolute, colorless clarity.

It does not always go easily.

Sometimes technicians are too slow and the body, trembling too hard to be held, slurs through blue lips, “… ‘mnotyer soldier,” with as much contempt as a man brought back from the verge of freezing to death can muster. Staggers in the opposite direction of the Reconditioning Station. His half-conscious brute strength is nearly effective— but he cannot, and never will, get far.

If a technician loses fingers when placing the bite guard it is a necessary expense.

 

* * *

 

 

**1959: Camaraderie**

The Winter Soldier, the _first_ Winter Soldier, in the right hands can be used to cut like obsidian. Unfortunately he is a blade without a hilt and there is a fine line between the pressure needed for honing obsidian and shattering it. After years of service, too many of them spent being taught and taught again and again, he is the first in line for decommissioning. But they will give him a final test: he is taught one last lesson, a new one, a simple one: to serve HYDRA beneath the White Queen.

And serve he does.

_1961: Siberia_

She’s exactly like the rest of his handlers— cold, implacable, competent— until she isn’t. She does not leave his side or use him as a shield in combat. She stops when he is wounded on a mission to apply tourniquets, pressure bandages. All in the interest, she says, of keeping him at optimal performance. Her eyes are so flat he has to believe it.

He does not know that she recognizes the blue of his eyes. It is not the first secret she has kept from the authority and her comrades, nor she supposes, will it be her last.

She is the closest thing he has had in his long life to a colleague, and as soon as he thinks it he thinks that can’t be true because she is small, blonde, and full of righteous anger on behalf of their cause... but she is controlled in a way that does not fit the pattern. She is not the first.

It confuses him. Makes his head pound to try to remember. A skinny kid from Brooklyn with blood in his teeth— he would follow him anywhere, too, just like the White Queen— and the Soldier shakes his head. Is glad for the cold seeping in through the flesh and metal of him. It is easier to fall asleep than it is to remember.

 

_1963: Dallas_

They assign her to the Soldier again. Their Winter Soldier, they tell her, and he is their most prized and most troublesome asset. They want to decommission him if he cannot be controlled.

There is something familiar in the blue of his eyes that she doesn't question. Knows only in her gut that he is hers, and she will do her level best to protect him.

She watches him aim, shoot the U.S. President, and something in her says, _this is not what I was made for_. Something unravels. Unspools like yarn in her chest and head and she knows, knows with the implacable certainty of the blades she prefers fighting with. With the certainty that her Soldier is a wolf contained in skin. That he will go where she directs, do as she bids. To the exclusion of even the authority’s wishes. That she must free him from HYDRA's grasp.

He is too kind, and she must protect that.

"Well done," she tells him, distracted, "Let's go home, hm?"

*

The White Queen has a name. The Soldier has heard it once. The other Soldiers, the recruits, they use it. “Nastoychivost.” _Perseverance_ , they call her and it is as true of her as it is of any of them but the name misses something of the danger contained in her.

To himself he calls her _Nesterov_ instead. It is not a nickname. It is not a name derived from her conditioning. It is the brand of the assault rifle they give him when he is assigned to shoot President Kennedy.

After the man is dead and his wife is crawling on the back of the car screaming with brain matter in her hands the White Queen tells the Soldier, her Soldier, in English, “Well done. Let’s go home, hm?”

He can’t think which startles him more, that this is the most she’s spoken to him yet or that she’s praised him. So he responds without thinking, “Sounds like a plan, Nesterov.”

 

_1967: Siberia iii_

Home in a geographical sense is Siberia's northernmost reaches where the ice fields aren't even broken by forests. Blinding and unforgettable. It is the base where all Soldiers rest. A maze of concrete and steel and shadow. Sometimes, when winter is fiercest, all power but the life support systems fail. Home is darkness.

There is no fear in sleeping. Freezing to death is easy. It is waking up that is the litmus of a Soldier's stability.

When he wakes next, they drag him halfway from his stasis chamber before he realizes that this is wrong. That these are not Nesterov's hands. Too cold to feel anything, let alone move, he has no choice but to let himself be dragged.

There is a man waiting for him. He stands closer to the conditioning station than most handlers comfortably place themselves. Unlike the others this one is unafraid. This one is meant to be familiar with his pale hair and military bearing and perhaps ten years ago he might have been.

Fear rattles in the Soldier's lungs like stubborn fluid. His jaw works as he watches and waits.

"My name is Alexander. You've been assigned a proper handler-- it's been far too long since you were brought to heel. Wouldn't you agree?"

On the back of his tongue he can feel questions and reproach and he sets his teeth against them. Nods once. His eyes flatten into the middle distance.  
"Ah, now, see, that's what I'm talking about." Alexander takes the Soldier's chin, forces him to look, to focus. Scolding, “Use your words.”

“... I agree.”

Alexander hums, “Acceptable, but I think you can actually believe it if you try. Don’t worry; that’s what I’m here for, to help you believe.”

* * *

 

 

**1973: Enough**

Sleep comes easily but waking is pain. The light, relentless. The heat. Warmth like a furnace, like burning alive.

He thinks he remembers a mother talking about distant cousins who were _"burning alive over there”. How it was stupid to be a Jew and willingly go where they were slaughtering Jews wholesale. Duty or not. What has this country ever done for them? She didn’t know the half of it. Whose mother was she?_

— Restraints come loose. He opens his eyes, chest heaving, lashes out —

— _He did not enlist. He was drafted. She had cried when the letter came. He thinks, she would have gone to her grave thinking her son had died_ —

— It isn’t a doctor standing beside him. Just a woman. Barely more than a girl. But she’s caught his fist— it is metal, alien, still crackling with frost— without a hint of strain. She is not afraid that he might kill her and that is something new—

— _They took the star with his_ dog tags _. Whose name was written on them?—_

 _—_ for a shaking breath, he is still. Still as the first snow of winter. Then he remembers: she is Nesterov. He will serve under her. Follow her.

He grasps for the coherent thread in his confusion, feeling cold and overheated at once. The air stings with every breath and there is frost melting out of his hair in slow drips down his back. “Sorry, Nesterov. I-- I thought you were someone else.” It’s the first joke, if inflection and the slightest sliver of smile make for humor, that The Winter Soldier has ever made.

It is an anomaly.

It is noted.

Still, he accepts the bite guard from her hands, lets her keep all of her fingers, and is pliant when they tie him down. Looking up at Nesterov he wonders if, once this is over, she might let him ask questions.

Then, it begins.

“Zhelaniye.”

Then, he forgets.

 

_1977: Bayeux_

There are no moments when they are not on a mission; weapons are used or they are put in storage. This is, at least, his understanding of his purpose.

In the French countryside there is a diplomat who needs to have a tragic accident beside a lake and because the Winter Soldier does not (cannot be trusted to) operate alone, he and the White Queen have been deployed. The hostel is nestled between two hills. Their room opens onto a courtyard garden where the ground is inlaid with mosaic tiles that form the solar system. The garden is planted with hyacinths and lilac and honeysuckle.

He and Nesterov go swimming. Or: he does laps and explores the lake bottom, Nesterov sunbathes. She avoids water at all costs.

Across the lake, the diplomat drowns.

“Well done,” she tells him. “Let’s go home.”

They give quiet, bereft interviews to the local police and are permitted to go back to their room— it was a tragic accident, yes, they would be able to make their flight in the morning, yes, they could have the police chief’s card in case any details came back to them.

That night they drink sweet red wine that will not get them drunk and watch the sun set over the garden wall.

He stares at the lengthening shadows and asks, “Do you— do they put you under, too? Put you on ice?” After all, there are five cryostasis units but Nesterov makes for the sixth body. The question begs to be asked.

Nesterov likes disco, plums, the sweet taste of white wine, chocolate. She does not eat certain meats. There are prayers she knows and does not know how she knows. In that way she does not let herself know. She teaches them to the Soldier. She calls him her wolf. She thinks about what it is to be drinking red wine in the setting sun. She tells him, "There is a chamber. Made of liquid amber."

She tells him, "Every time they put me under I relearn how to drown."

She tells him, "You are more than what they would have you become."

He turns to blink at her. He pictures her drowning under his hands. He has been ordered to kill comrades before. Just like the diplomat that morning, he sees her clawing at his skin and the metal of his left arm and her eyes beneath the water, her face a mask of outrage and confusion. Except Nesterov, he thinks, would not allow him to do that. She would fight him. Hurt him. For that sort of failure he would deserve to be hurt.

“I don’t understand what you mean, Nesterov. I am…” The end of the statement vanishes from his tongue as soon as he wants to say it.

This marks the first time she touches him outside of duty, she reaches across to run her fingers through his hair. It is soft, thick. It feels good beneath the pads of her fingers and she smiles, a small strange thing. "You Are." She tells him, "And that is enough for now."

 

_1983: Beijing_

_Enough is not always enough._

The thought stays with him through re-education and reassignment; a larger mission in China meant to have no survivors. Nothing low profile because none of the dead will be missed no matter who they belong to.

Combat is full of clear lines in black and white. Shots line themselves up without thought, his hands playing at their killing trick in harmony. But even against the black tactical armor Nesterov is wearing her blood is bright red in the corner of his eye. Not a spray, not a headshot or arterial rupture (not on the surface at least) but bright and distracting at the middle of her back just the same.

The enemy does not get to fire a second round. Hopefully his last was satisfying.

 _A Soldier should have had her six_. He was on her three but he should have covered her six, too; none of their new recruits is good enough to have her back.

He is beside Nesterov, on the ground, thoughtless of much beyond the need to get to real cover in the rat warren they are calling a battlefield. Color comes back to the world and gunfire clatters too loud to think. Silver flecks in the concrete beneath his knees. White gold, Nesterov’s hair braided thick around her crown. Pale blue, the shirt she has on beneath her armor that is no doubt being stained darker and darker violet. He presses one hand to the wound, digs in his pockets for something, anything to improvise as a bandage.

“Hey, it’s okay, I’m here, I’m right here,” he tells her. "We're gonna get you patched up and get home, okay, I need you to stay still for me, okay? I'm not goin' anywhere just gimme a minute here then we're gonna go home--" He's said this before. He keeps up rambling nonsense on instinct that is clearer than any mission objective he’s been given in life.

He remembers: the fallen are comforted and the inevitable is refused. Deny that shit right up until the moment they die in their foxholes terrified and agonized beside those lucky enough to still be breathing. His first foxhole buddy died in his arms. Screaming and trying so hard to fold his intestines back into his body. He’d kept talking to him the whole time, right up until the kid had been pulled away from him for burial.

“I’m sorry, I know it hurts. But that’s good— can you feel your legs, Nesterov? I'm gonna need you to try to stand up. We gotta get outta here.”

Another Soldier appears in the corner of his eye. He looks up at his brother in arms, Sergei was his name before, and asks, “Do you have a pressure bandage? She’s pretty fucked up.”

“A liability,” comes the response.

It’s an early lesson: Disabled assets are liabilities. Liabilities are terminated.

Before Sergei can aim, a neat hole appears in his forehead. He slumps sideways in slow sequence as if his body has not yet realized the gravity of the situation.

“Idiot,” he mutters, holstering his pistol. Then to Nesterov, “Alright, c’mon, we don’t wanna miss our flight,” and he heaves her up because the choice between dying here or doing worse damage and maybe living is no choice at all.

They reach their destination, she tells her wolf this. There is a lot of blood, but she can feel all her extremities.

The rendezvous point, an industrial rooftop in an abandoned township all but destroyed by lead poisoning and gang warfare, is hard enough to reach without any kind of distraction. There are other Soldiers to take care of the mark and take care of it they do.

“Good, that’s good,” comes his response to their report. In his focus he is distracted.

Their objective— retrieval of a biological weapon— takes backseat to older, more salient lesson: no soldier left behind.

He is careful to lay Nesterov flat, jostling her as little as possible as if that will make up for carrying her through so many floors of combat already, covers her with his flak jacket. The weight, he knows without knowing quite _why_ , will help her body remember it isn’t dying. Stave off the disorientation of shock. Something like that.

With one hand he braces himself— he should be piloting them but, and they all know this, The White Queen will always be his first priority— and beneath the jacket he laces his fingers with hers. Like her praise and his nickname for her it is another secret between them.

*

An inch to the left and this would be a different ending.

Instead, the authority removes the bullet, they cauterize the wound, they send her and the Soldier back into the field.

She does not tell anyone that her back aches afterward. That she can feel the occasional pull of scar tissue. A knot of it that rubs nerve endings in a way that sometimes makes her fingers tremble.

She knows exactly what the authority might have done had she been returned unable to walk. She has seen the schematics of a spine and pelvis. Has heard the discussion, seen the resultant experiments. The bodies mangled with metal and cruel ingenuity but somehow _still walking_ — Nesterov is lucky, she is aware of this.

She begins to plan anyway.

 

_1984: Paris_

Paris is one mission among many. It is unremarkable.

In the shadows of the Arc de Triomphe they have a moment, half a breath where they will not be seen, and she uses it to kiss the Winter Soldier on a balmy summer night while he still has blood on his face.

Nesterov presses the bullet that might have unmade her into his palm. It is as close to an admission as she will get.

He cannot ask her how she got a hold of the bullet. They are overheard. There is always oversight, no matter how minimal. He thinks he knows why she is giving it to him and for just a moment he pulls her against his chest and curls his body around hers. She smells, as their kind always do, of gun oil. Sweat. Kevlar. Amber. Then, as if it never happened, he steps away from her.

“Let’s go home.”

But before they do he stops by a jeweler’s shop. One of the few left in the world, he’s sure, without video surveillance. That might have something to do with the number of guns, likely illegal, that the proprietor keeps hidden. The bullet leaves an impression in the skin of his palm that doesn’t fade until he has it back again, strung on a chain. It will hang unseen beneath his clothes and as long as Nesterov is still the one to wake him and put him under, no one will have to know.

They are amassing quite the collection of secrets.

* * *

 

 

**1991: Siberia**

Nesterov is not there when they wake him and he has forgotten what it is like to be dragged from the quiet of a crypt into the light. The Soldier cannot get his feet under him and with every step his handlers take the bullet on its chain swings into his line of sight. The chain, sterling silver, is still cold across the back of his neck.

Alexander is waiting for him. He’s gotten old in a way that the Soldier has rarely seen in his handlers. He wears glasses. The passage of time is, suddenly, tangible. “Good morning—”

“Where’s Nesterov?” His voice is rough with disuse and speaking is, in and of itself, an act of defiance. The backhanded blow he gets for it shouldn’t wound more than his pride-- or the suggestion of it, he has none, he wants none-- but his teeth catch his lip, set it bleeding.

“See, I know you’ve been out of it for a while, so let me remind you: that was rude.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Not yet, but we can work on that.” Alexander wipes his hand on a handkerchief as if he’s come in contact with some kind of filth. Then, with the handkerchief, he reaches out and takes hold of the bullet. “What’s this?”

There is a right answer and it is not, _A bullet, are you blind?_   One simply does not talk to one's superiors that way. The Soldier’s jaw works for a moment while he finds something better to say. He can offer nothing but the truth: “A gift.”

“Ah, from your friend Nesterov, isn’t it?”

A whole breath passes— no one should know her name, they have not earned it, he has not earned it, it is foul in his mouth— before he can make himself say, “Yes.”

“That’s sweet. A little too recognizable, don’t you think? It’s the sort of thing a witness would remember.”

The Soldier doesn’t leave witnesses but this is not the place to say it. The chain pulls free from his neck with a soft pop.

“Why don’t I hang onto this for you?”

The Soldier watches him drop the necklace, bullet-first, into the pocket of his waistcoat like a hypnotist’s watch.

As always, it begins with restraints and _longing_.

The Soldier is quiet except for his animal heartbeat protesting the slow process of electrocution and learning. There is always so much to learn. They demand so much of him when the inside of his skull feels like an oven (no, a _furnace_ ).

A litany of questions ( _Where is Nesterov? What will they make me do without her? Is she decommissioned? How long would it take to break their necks? Did she fail? How do I get out?_ ) rise like the sun then—

Then, the countdown stops at _one_ and _freight car_ and the burning ozone-and-meat stench of his skin fades into background noise. Spring-clear stillness settles over him.

Next, he knows, there will be directives and blood and he will succeed or die trying.

 

 _1997: Antarctica_  

They do not store Nesterov as they do the other soldiers. The men (and lone woman) locked into capsules and frozen. Ageless. Nesterov is ageless in much the same way, but the amber fluid she is kept in, she is kept in because she has—

— she doesn't know.

She has the strength and speed of their Soldiers. More than some, with the way she once stopped the Winter Soldier's metal arm from breaking her face. One delicate palm wrapped around the icy cold of his fist. They torment her, some days, with the knowledge that she is unlike the others.

She knows she's been there the longest. Can see it in the age of the men who come and go. In the way the technology around her shifts.

Unlike the Soldiers, they do not use the cradle on her to reprogram her. The cradle with its electricity, is all about compliance and punishment.

She has been too free with her Soldier.

When she is brought out of the amber, choking quietly and vomiting bile and gold onto the floor, there's a woman standing some feet from her, one blue eye one brown and she looks vaguely ill. She's new. She won't be for very long.

The woman is called Ursula Blake. She dresses like the best parts of an acid trip threw up on her, she discovers rapidly that Nesterov is not like the other Soldiers. "So. You've been with them you're whole life?" She's taking Nesterov's vitals. The instruments she uses are bizarre. They look like something out of a novel her wolf would have liked.

Nesterov nods.

Ursula snorts, "Well. Well you're all human near as I can tell. And there's no funny business happening anywhere in you that isn't straight up cult indoctrination."

Nesterov levels a flat look at her, talk like that will bring the authority to bear.

Except wherever they are, they are far enough from the iron fist of the authority, that the men in the base allow Nesterov to trail Ursula Blake. She is as strong as the other soldiers, and she assumes, she has been in the amber for long enough, that they have forgotten she is the only asset for whom their Winter Soldier followed without question.

She tells Ursula about him, and Ursula says -- "You love him."

"I cannot love. I am a weapon."

Ursula scoffs and points a finger at her, "Listen. I like you, so I'm going to keep in touch with you when I bust outta here. But you- you aren't a weapon. You're more person than any of the goons in here. Including the ones they make me poke. You love him. That's what that feeling is."

Nesterov ruminates on this.

 

_1998: Siberia_

Nesterov frightens a great many of HYDRA's newest recruits. She is too quiet, they say. Too old. There are none who are alive still, who remember when exactly she came to the program.

She is too aware to be trusted, but she has not once in her tenure ever given cause for distrust. She accomplishes her missions, she complies. She is too dangerous to be allowed to live and too important to their cause to be decommissioned.

This is not their mistake.

Their mistake is allowing her to keep company with the technopath, Ursula Blake. The day Ursula breaks free of the facility, she uses the confusion to set the stage her own jailbreak. She strongly suspects that Ursula may have planned it that way.

*

The mission-- Nesterov’s mission, their last mission, the mission that clearly did not come from their handlers or any authority they serve-- comes in two parts and relies in part on her Soldier’s good luck and remarkable, stubborn memory.

It is always tender, the way she settles him in to be frozen to near-death for a month, a year, a decade, until he is needed again. She is attentive to him, his presentation, because the image of their program is as vital to its success as its effectiveness. No one but the Soldier notices the soft foam plugs she slips into his ears while finger combing his hair back from his face.

He recognizes the words, “Let’s go home,” on her lips. She says it with a smile.

He only understands them once the limbo of unconsciousness has taken hold.

* * *

 

 

**2003: Escape**

He blinks frost from the delicate membranes of his corneas. The blindness is temporary and expected.

The deafness is new.

There are hands on him. Small, impossibly hot by way of contrast, guiding him to stand, to move— Nesterov is a blurry shape in the dim. He can feel her talking through his hand on her shoulder.

He blinks his eyes through healing and tries to think of how to be inconspicuous. His own heartbeat, sluggish, keeps time in his ears. Impossibly loud and getting louder as he and the earplugs thaw, muffling then silencing the ghostly sounds of doctors and machinery.

He follows every gesture Nesterov makes; the easiest way to look as if he is unaware is to simply sit back and wait.

Then, Nesterov steps away quicker than his eye can track. The first doctor’s neck snaps with the soft sensation of a bone being pulled out of joint.

The Soldier rolls to the ground, stays low to drag the next one down and break his skull against the corner of a desk. Then comes after a gunshot that grazes his cheek. He can see the man’s last words on his lips, frantic and reading from a notebook as if he hadn’t had the sense to memorize his lesson: zhelaniye _,_ rzhavyy _,_ semndstat— it’s no way to maintain steady aim.

“For shame,” he hears himself scold in stereo in a voice that borders on glad, “you shoulda done your homework, bud.”

The Soldier has fought blind but never completely deaf. This is new. This will hurt.

But now at least he’s armed.

Nesterov makes her way into his field of vision and spattered liberally with blood. There is a feral sort of glee to her movements. He can see that she, too, is wearing earplugs. Small and obnoxiously yellow against the skin of her ears.

It doesn’t take more than a moment to relieve the dead of their arms and armor— but boots, he foregoes entirely. The base will be full of armed men running half-panicked if the flashing, seizure-bright lights are any indication of the level of security breach they just enacted. He wants to feel them coming.

There are more men with guns, knives, grenades— the base is meant to survive nuclear blasts— and they all die with their mouths moving. It's funny to see them trying.

The Soldier’s world has been reduced to silence and the dull roar of his own lungs and the brush of Nesterov’s shoulders against his back when they round corners.

Some beg for mercy, some try for other words (sliva, odin, skvorets) that he recognizes the shape of but knows aren't meant for him.

Those, he leaves breathing, drags them to Nesterov.

*

The real mission--staying hidden, going home-- begins here: emerging onto the snow fields of Siberia in the purple light of dusk, shadows long beside them.

*

It’s called “extinction”.

Nesterov tells him about it when they go to ground in Romania in the middle of a blizzard.

The house they choose to squat in has no electricity but it is positioned defensibly on the outskirts of a small town, a mile back from the road. It’s stonework front has been graffitied time and again in a confused riot of colors and it’s windows are broken but the cellar is finished and suitable enough for living in. They do not disturb the rundown chaos of the main floor.

Nesterov explains the relationship between stimulus and response and that, when given a stimulus with no reinforcement a response will eventually die out.

“So we’re gonna treat each other like lab rats? You know what they do to lab rats when the experiment’s over, right? I read about it back in—” He casts around vaguely for the year and comes up blank; it’s been a long time since the mission that had him set up as a graduate student at Oxford. The memory is vague, something about radiation sickness— “Whatever. Anyway. They don’t let you take the rats home after they’ve been all fucked up no matter how cute or harmless they are.”

“Do you have a better idea?”

“What will we do if it doesn’t work? If one of us doesn’t comply and… goes rogue? We’re not like them,” he nods to the lone window in the cellar and the snow covering it.

“What do you do with rats after an experiment ends, fails?”

He stares at her, sick at heart.

She goes on, “It would be euthanasia for the greater good.”

“I won’t kill you. I can’t kill you.” Even if he had it in him to kill her he can't think that she would allow it.

Nesterov doesn’t tell him that he could order her to let herself die. She has seen it done to other Soldiers, to failures. She tells him, wry and almost smiling, “Then it has to work, doesn’t it?”

*

The cellar is barely large enough for the mattress they dragged down from the top floor of the farmhouse. It is more than enough space for their limited gear and gas camp stove. Outside the blizzard goes on, unforgiving and thunderous in its rage.

“Gnev. Starista. Devyatnadsay. Otets.”

He sits with his back to the cold drywall in silence and speaks under the din of the storm. Ten words take Nesterov from subtle mutiny and humor down to the bare metal of weapon he recognizes from the field.

“Ya gotov vypolnit,” she replies. Her voice is pitched low and flat.

The Winter Soldier sits with his arms still around her— induction is always painful in suggested, learned ways that no drug can diminish, always violent— and says nothing. Suddenly he thinks this is the harder of the two steps in the process of extinction: waiting. Nesterov sits stock still for a full day, watching him out of the corner of her eye and waiting for orders that will never come. He moves as little as he can and watches her right back so of course she waits for him to turn his back to move.

She exhales heavily, a woman relieved, then slumps back against the wall.

Their mattress has no pillows. They were long gone with the contents of the house’s cupboards.

He almost drops the gun he’s cleaning in surprise.

She asks him, clear-eyed and awake, “Do you want to take turns?”

“Yes.”

Because he is a selfish creature and will do anything to delay doing this to her again.

 

_2004: Râșnov_

Nesterov is very quietly coming to terms with the fact that the voice she has heard all her life, may well have belonged to her father.

The Soldier is always keyed up on the knife's edge of violence when his trigger words are used. The first time, Nesterov ends up with a split lip before the Soldier recognizes her. Anyone lesser would have had no recognizable face left from the force of his fist. Licking her lips clean, she settles against the wall afterward to wait.

*

One day she tells him, "I think I was born in Louisiana." She pronounces it _Loo-zee-ana_. She isn't certain, "Or Murmansk. Paris? I remember swamps and cypress."

“Louisiana explains your taste in food,” he replies mimicking the accent she affects. Nesterov does it better. He rubs a hand through the beard he’s growing; it’s unseemly and the sooner he can be rid of it, the better.

She snorts, "I have impeccable taste in food." She stretches her legs out. It's cold in the cellar, but it is a different cold than what she is accustomed to. Not bad, only different.

“Whatever helps you sleep at night.” Since they’re sharing, he adds, “My name’s Bucky Barnes. Well. James Buchanan Barnes but nobody wants to be called that.” It’s such a small and obvious thing to say aloud. She’s known him for decades, she must have known his name, too, but he feels better saying it all the same. “I grew up in Brooklyn.”

"I know," she says it quietly, "I met you. In the 40s." A pause, then, "Or I should say that you met a young army nurse and showed her a good time-" if Nesterov were capable of it anymore, she would blush.

“You know everything,” he complains and laughs a little. He remembers Austria. That there was a beautiful girl he’d wasted more days than he should have dragging her back into bed. Her perfume had smelled of plums and vanilla. “That was you, huh? Lydia, wasn’t it? You don’t look like a Lydia, that’s a terrible cover name, Nesterov."

They laugh then he asks, "So, how the hell’d you end up in Occupied territory from Louisiana?”

"I don't know." This is a lie, she suspects she does know. She suspects it has something to do with the things she recalls, her father's voice, and her distaste for being submerged in water. The way she says it saps the humor from him and replaces it with a relative of foreboding. There are people behind what she does not know, just as there are people behind the holes in his own memory, and he would do a great many evil things to get five minutes alone with them.

Then he shrugs, says, “It’ll probably come with time,” like he knows, like he’s done this before and it’s supposed to be reassuring. “And if it doesn’t, what’s it matter? Everyone who was alive back then’s probably dead now... or senile. We can start over.”

She rolls her eyes upward and counts cracks in the tile ceiling, “And I chose Lydia because I was Anya Miskevich at the time under authority directive to observe key members of the Third Reich, until the Howling Commandos were documented in the area and they wanted to know if you knew anything.” A moment’s pause, “I was not supposed to sleep with you, I did it anyway because I liked how you looked at me. You are the first and only man I’ve ever slept with. Do you want a toaster oven?” The joke is poorly timed and too dry because Nesterov as herself, has no real discernible sense of humor, but it is always worth it if it makes the Soldier—  _Bucky—_  smile.

Bucky laughs, half-confused by the sentiment. “I’m a little behind on the times but I’m pretty sure you’re the one who’s s’pposed to get the toaster oven, doll, since I’m pretty sure I haven’t been a virgin since… oh, 1935? We didn’t have toaster ovens back then, just lousy IOU’s for the soup kitchen.”

She preens at his laughter. "I wouldn't know. There was a particular Op they sent me on without you in the mid-80’s. I think I would have preferred an IOU for the soup kitchen."

“Uh-huh, see, you say that now, but the soup kitchen don’t take IOU’s and being hungry and horny’s a fuckin’ drag. With a toaster oven you can at least make snacks in the afterglow.” His grin melts into a wince when, suddenly, he remembers the mission in question, “I mean you can also put a guy’s head in a toaster oven but that’s… not really their intended use.”

"But my point was well made. I am surprised you are aware of that operation. You were in Prague at the time, I think?"

“Word gets around base when you kill someone in a spectacular way— did you think all we got up to was murder? Nah, those jerks gossiped worse than my grandma’s knitting circle and they loved talkin’ about you. Like you were a movie star or somethin’— I never saw it,” he teases.

Nesterov snorts, "I am older than all of them." She isn't certain how she knows that. That's... it's a piece of information to have presented suddenly in her brain. But it's there all the same, "You never understood because I was assigned your handler. I think it is different when you work with the person in question on a regular basis."

It's surreal to discuss the work they did while under the authority. Under HYDRA, she reminds herself. They hold no power over either of them any longer. Suddenly she makes a decision. "We will go to São Paolo eventually. I have a..." She stumbles over the word, "-- _friend_. There."

“Sure. Have I ever been to Brazil? Have you?” He shrugs, “But yeah, alright. We should probably see this extinction through to the end, if there’s gonna be one. Maybe after the new year?”

A hum, "You were not, I have been, you'll like it. Plenty of sun. I will warn you, the friend... she is how I escaped the facility in Antarctica. She is..." her eyes narrowed, "I think the current vernacular is 'a trip' -- but we should finish here first." She smiles, "We should spend New Year's in Paris, when we are free of the triggers."

It sparks a chain of half memories— the bullet, the countryside, a song on the radio in his mother’s living room. “ _L’parfum et l’eau c’est pour rien mon marquis sous les ponts de Paris_ ,” he half-sings, thrilled to remember the melody. He wouldn’t mind speaking French for a while. “I guess we better get back to work. There’s nothing like havin’ something to look forward too, huh?”

 

_2005: Paris_

They ring in the New Year on an apartment rooftop in Paris. For all its foul air and tourists it is their favorite city.

The apartment is bigger than the cellar in Romania (not by much) and safer than the Icelandic warehouse (by leagues) and they have to climb through the skylight to get to the roof but it’s worth the effort of stacking chairs on top of the worn and scuffed coffee table that came with the lease. Bucky puts up white Christmas lights and picks up petite-fours from the bakery down the block and finds the only radio station in France that plays Frank Sinatra— and about breaks his damn neck running a drop cord up to the roof so the radio will have power.

But it’s worth it.

Their breaths ghost and mingle in the mid-winter glow of a city on the edge of the unknown and they stand together for a while and soak it in. For the evening they have nothing to think about but the moon over Paris and the turn of a new century. For the evening they are only two people among millions watching the sky burst into a cacophony of color and starlight.

For the evening, at least, they pretend.


End file.
